Reviews of The Grand Pursuit

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904836104576557360442970594.html">James Grant - a nice summary of the book and Grant would have liked Nasar to have included Murray Rothbard -

BusinessweekNeither Nasar’s topics nor her characters conform to a neat, linear organization. Economics has no agreed-upon catechism, and Nasar has written the book she chose to write, not a book that a conventional reading of history demands. Curiously, she includes a fine portrait of the young Milton Friedman as a New Deal bureaucrat, but not of the later free-market apostle who achieved influence and fame. And she is too forgiving of the modern academy’s enslavement to the computer. “The fear that using mathematics would cause other languages to wither turned out to be overblown,” she asserts. If anything, they were underblown. Formula-derived economic models, embraced by economists with utter certainty, helped to foster the financial crisis and other modern traumas. Perhaps inevitably in a broad survey, some of Nasar’s transitions are abrupt, but overall Grand Pursuit is artfully rendered and a delight to read.

LA TimesBeginning her book in the era of Charles Dickens, "when the specter of hunger was stalking England," Nasar takes us through the times that influenced economic thinkers and the theories they put forth. We see Marx — a lazy procrastinator who impregnates his wife and a housekeeper in the same year — walking through the streets of London with his generous, patient sponsor Engels, "their extreme myopia and the sulfurous yellow London fog obscur[ing] everything more than a foot ahead."

We also see Joseph Schumpeter, who theorized that entrepreneurs were the key to economic progress and who had a habit of challenging university librarians to duels and arriving at lectures in jodhpurs. Beatrice Potter Webb, who advanced the idea of a welfare state and advocated for a government safety net, arrived at that conclusion only after a failed love affair with Joseph Chamberlain, the father of a future British prime minister. Alfred Marshall, a founder of modern economics, wore a handlebar mustache and took up knitting during an illness, and discovered, Nasar writes, that businesses didn't just exist to produce a profit for their owners. He realized they were also meant to "produce higher living standards for consumers and workers."